


For Convenience' Sake

by Haberdasher



Series: Good Omens Convenience Store AU [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Convenience Store, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Retail, Based on a Tumblr Post, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fluff, Human Aziraphale (Good Omens), Human Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Meet-Cute, Name Changes, Names, Other, Trans, Trans Character, Trans Crowley (Good Omens), Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 22:55:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21023591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haberdasher/pseuds/Haberdasher
Summary: An AU where Crowley works in a convenience store, and Aziraphale is one of his... odder customers.





	For Convenience' Sake

Working whatever shifts he could get at the local 24-hour convenience store, Crowley had seen his fair share of unusual customers. The drunks, the stoners, the idiots, the pranksters... some days, it seemed like that lot outnumbered the “normal” customers, the ones who came to the store with a specific purchase in mind and just wanted to get what they came for without too much fuss.

But one of Crowley’s more unusual customers didn’t fit clearly into any of his typical categories, and what’s more, he was quickly becoming a regular there.

The man appeared to be about the same age as Crowley himself, but he always wore an outfit that made him look like he’d come straight from the Victorian era, with a fancy, perfectly-fitted beige suit (Crowley couldn’t tell if it was always the same suit, or several identical ones that were all equally well-tailored and blemish-free) complete with a tartan bow tie. The feeling that the man had somehow fallen through time and missed a couple centuries in the process wasn’t helped by the fact that, the first time Crowley saw him, the man entered the store at roughly three in the morning, slowly circled the shop while repeatedly stopping to closely examine seemingly-random products, and then wished Crowley a good day as he exited the shop about half an hour after entering it without buying a single thing in the process. (Crowley had wondered at first if it was a very elaborate method of shoplifting, but most of the items the man had stopped to inspect were far too bulky to hide upon his person, and besides, that fancy suit of his didn’t look to have much in the way of pockets or other places to stash ill-gotten goods.)

Most customers who wore get-ups that nice treated Crowley like he was the dirt beneath their feet, making it clear that they thought they were far superior to him just because they had money to their name and Crowley, working a dead-end minimum wage job at a convenience store, clearly didn’t, but the man in the beige suit was a clear exception to that general rule. He made a habit of politely greeting Crowley whenever entering or leaving the shop, asked Crowley the odd question (and some of them were odd indeed) here or there, and generally seemed to actually see Crowley as a fellow human being rather than a mere automaton made to serve him. It was perhaps a bit sad that such human decency made the man in the beige suit stand out from so many other customers that Crowley had to deal with from day to day, but so it did.

For months the man in the beige suit came and went at odd hours without Crowley having the slightest clue who he was or even what his name was, but Crowley didn’t think too much of it at the time; he could say the same about a number of his regulars, after all.

But all that changed in the middle of one particular overnight shift.

A half-asleep Crowley had groaned a little when the bell at the front of the store that let him know a customer had entered went off, but his groaning stopped when he saw who it was that had entered the shop. The man in the beige suit was polite enough, at least, and though he seemed a bit strange, he never made himself too much of a bother. He could think of few other people he would rather have seen walk through that door--actually, now that he made himself stop and think about it, he couldn’t think of a single customer he would have preferred to have there instead.

The man in the beige suit waved at Crowley as he walked inside. “Beautiful evening out there, don’t you think?”

Crowley was pretty sure that the time was well past “evening” at this point in the night, and he had no clue as to whether it was nice out or not given that he’d been working inside for several hours and would be working for several more, but he gave a quick nod in response, just to be polite.

“It’s a good time for a little stroll around the neighborhood, I say. Nice and quiet.” 

Crowley made a non-committal grunt in response, holding back a litany of comments that went through his head about how going for “a little stroll around the neighborhood” this time of night was probably a good way to get yourself killed if you weren’t careful, and the man in the beige suit didn’t especially strike him as the careful sort, thinking it wiser to just hold his tongue and judge in silence.

The man started perusing the items available within the store in a way that Crowley associated with him and him alone, as if this was the only time he’d ever been inside a convenience store and he was going to examine every last bit of it while he had the chance. Crowley watched him go about his business, partly out of boredom, partly because there wasn’t much else to do, but partly because something about this strange Victorian-looking man interested him in a way few other store regulars could even dream of.

After a couple minutes, the man in the beige suit stood in place by the slushie machine and looked over at Crowley, asking, “What flavor is the blue... frozen beverage you have here?”

“Frozen beverage” was as good a way as any to describe them, Crowley supposed, especially because even he was struggling to remember exactly what corporate insisted on calling them here.

“It’s... blue.” Crowley said without thinking, then shook his head, knowing that some customers would scream and yell and throw a tantrum for him giving such a useless answer. (The man in the beige suit, on the other hand, barely seemed to react to his less-than-helpful response.)

After blinking a few times in the hopes of it helping him wake up a bit, Crowley added, “Blue raspberry, I think.”

What exactly a blue raspberry _was_, Crowley couldn’t say, and he was fairly certain one wouldn’t even remotely recognize the contents of the machine as being similar to the actual fruit it was named after--really, that stuff tasted _blue_ more than anything, hence his initial response--but that was an idiosyncrasy Crowley was willing to ignore, given how many other idiosyncrasies the store contained at any given moment.

“Blue raspberry, you say? That sounds positively delightful,” the man in the beige suit said.

(Not only did the man _look_ like he had just come from the Victorian era, half the time he _sounded_ that way too, Crowley thought to himself.)

The man in the beige suit walked away from the slushie machine, and for a moment Crowley thought that that would be the end of the conversation, but then the man picked up two sizable bags of crisps and held them in the air with the labels facing in Crowley’s direction.

“Which of these do you think would go better with the blue raspberry frozen beverage you have available over there?”

One of the bags of crisps was, apparently, sour cream-flavored, while the other was salt and vinegar-flavored. The bags were of two different brands, neither of which Crowley could remember ever having tried himself.

This wasn’t the weirdest question the man in the beige suit had ever asked Crowley, but it stood a decent chance at breaking the top five, at least.

Despite his lack of first-hand experience with those particular brands of crisps on their own, let alone when paired with a blue slushie, Crowley didn’t hesitate in responding.

“Oh, the salt and vinegar ones, definitely.”

Crowley’s response may have been slightly biased by the fact that Crowley himself adored salt and vinegar crisps, to the point where he’d had a few days when those were all he could make himself eat. He didn’t know whether the man in the beige suit shared his taste in crisps, but he had asked what _Crowley_ thought would go better with the slushie, after all, and that was his own opinion. Besides, he couldn’t imagine sour cream crisps going very well with... well... _blue_.

“Wonderful.” The man set down the package of sour cream crisps and headed towards Crowley, his tight grip on the salt and vinegar crisp package only loosening when he gently set them down on the counter. “I’d like to buy these crisps and your largest size of blue raspberry frozen beverage, please.”

Crowley rang up the order. “That’ll be four pounds even.”

Crowley purposely neglected to mention that he’d applied his own employee discount in order to bring the man in the beige suit’s order down to that price.

To be fair, Crowley’s manager had told him that he could apply his employee discount to the orders of other customers using his own discretion so long as it wasn’t being used for sneaky business like telling customers the usual price and then pocketing the difference.

Also to be fair, Crowley was pretty sure his manager had had that in mind as a way of pleasing customers who wouldn’t shut up about how they deserved a discount for any of a number of bullshit reasons, not as something he could give to a customer who not only didn’t seem to mind the regular price but, at a glance, didn’t even appear to register that the price he was being charged wasn’t what it should be on the basis of simple maths.

“Here you go.” The man handed over a twenty-pound note, as Crowley knew from experience that he would--Crowley half-suspected that the man would use even bigger notes to pay for his orders if the convenience store would accept them.

“That’s sixteen pounds in change back for you, then.” Crowley handed over the change, which the man in the beige suit stuffed into a wallet that then seemed to disappear into the pockets of his suit, as well as a cup, lid, and straw for the slushie. “The... frozen beverages are pour-your-own.”

“Oh, I- I didn’t expect that... can you show me how it’s done?”

Usually, Crowley would have declined in a heartbeat.

For one thing, asking to be shown how a machine like that works usually seemed to mean doing it for the customer, often wasting a good deal of slushie material in the process, and being unable to assist any other customers that entered in the meantime until he was done.

For another thing, leaving the register unattended and turning his back to the rest of the store seemed like a good way for someone to get rather a lot of shoplifting done while he’s distracted, and his manager would definitely claim that it was all his fault if that happened.

But instead, Crowley found himself leaving his spot at the register and saying, “Sure, not a problem.”

“Oh, thank you.”

As the man in the beige suit and Crowley walked side-by-side over to the slushie machine, the man asked, “Say, I’ve never formally introduced myself to you, have I?”

Crowley shook his head. “Don’t believe that you have, no.”

“My name’s Mister Fell. I run a bookstore that’s just down the road.”

Crowley believed the man, but hadn’t the slightest clue where the book shop in question might be; then again, he’d never been much of a bookworm, and now on the rare occasion that he had money left over to spend on luxuries books wouldn’t even come close to making the list.

“Do you have a first name, Mister Fell?”

Crowley regretted voicing the question as soon as he’d finished asking it. It was rude, really, the kind of absentminded rudeness that he knew from experience could turn even seemingly mild-mannered customers into beings that appeared to be composed entirely out of pure rage in the blink of an eye.

“I do, yes.” Mister Fell replied, his tone making it clear that he considered his response a sufficient answer to Crowley’s question.

Well.

Crowley supposed he deserved that.

Maybe Mister Fell’s first name was an embarrassing one; maybe Mister Fell felt that giving away his first name to a mere convenience store cashier was beneath him; maybe Mister Fell was in the same position Crowley himself had been in some years back, where he’d had a name that was supposed to be his own but just didn’t feel quite right, to the point where he felt awkward giving it out when asked, even before he’d come up with a name that fit better, or even realized why that first name had felt so wrong to begin with...

Regardless, Crowley supposed, the reason Mister Fell had behind not giving out his first name was really none of his business.

“And yourself?” Mister Fell asked.

Crowley glanced down at his name tag, which had his first name prominently displayed. Clearly Mister Fell wanted to know more than just that, then.

Technically, Crowley’s manager had told him that employees weren’t supposed to give out their full names to customers. Something about corporate not wanting liability for angry customers tracking down employees that had pissed them off on the clock.

Technically, Crowley didn’t give a damn what the rules said about giving out names right now.

“The name’s Anthony J. Crowley.”

“What does the J stand for?”

Crowley could feel his face heat up as he sputtered, “It’s just- just a J, really.”

That right there? That was a flat-out lie.

What the J _actually_ stood for was a name that Crowley had thought sounded cool for about two seconds when he was eighteen and had fervently regretted choosing ever since, one that he had grown to detest almost as much as the name his parents had saddled him with at birth after looking at his nether regions and making an assumption on his gender based on that and that alone, one that he didn’t tell anybody if he could find a way to avoid it. Honestly, he’d probably have changed it ages ago, but Crowley knew well enough that legal name changes required time and money and effort, and he seemed to have a chronic lack of all three these days.

It wasn’t the first time that Crowley had told that particular lie about his middle name being “just a J, really.” It was one of his more common go-to responses when people asked about it. In fact, he had used that statement, or ones similar to it, enough that Crowley was beginning to get letters addressed to “Anthony J Crowley,” the lack of a full stop after the J suggesting that the one who’d addressed it thought his middle name consisted solely of the J rather than it being an abbreviation for something, or, taking things one step further, letters addressed to “Anthony Jay Crowley.” Both of these amused him, and both were much preferred to letters that actually used his real full name when addressing him.

Mister Fell nodded. “I see. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mister Crowley.”

Crowley returned Mister Fell’s nod with one of his own. “Likewise.”

Mister Fell slowed his walk to a stop as he arrived in front of the slushie machine. “Now, how do you use one of these, exactly?”

“It’s pretty easy really, see, you just-” Crowley grabbed the cup that Mister Fell had set down and placed it under the blue part of the slushie dispenser. “You just put the cup under the flavor you want-”

“Got it.” Mister Fell’s arm joined Crowley’s own in holding onto the slushie cup, which was now slightly crinkled because of the force of their combined grips.

“And then you press this button right here, and it comes right out of the top and goes- oh.”

Crowley abruptly halted his speech as he noticed that a small bit of the blue slushie substance that the machine had just dispensed had fallen not into the cup but onto Mister Fell’s arm, leaving a small but noticeable blue blemish on his otherwise-pristine beige suit.

Mister Fell’s gaze followed Crowley’s own in moving from the slushie to the newfound stain on his suit. “Oh dear.”

Crowley immediately snapped back into customer service mode, all too aware that one wrong move at this point could lose him Mister Fell as a customer, if not his very job. “I’m so sorry about that, sir, that was a complete and total accident, I swear-”

Mister Fell stayed silent in the face of Crowley’s apologies, the expression on his face unchanging and difficult to read, which only put Crowley even more on edge.

“There’s some napkins over here, let me just try to wipe that down for you-”

Crowley hastily grabbed a fistful of napkins and shoved them, still largely bundled up within his fist, towards the stain in Mister Fell’s suit, only realizing how close he had gotten to Mister Fell and how personal, even intimate, such a gesture could seem when his fingers brushed briefly against Mister Fell’s arm. His arm, from what little Crowley could feel of it, was cool and smooth and soft, probably the result of him never having had to do the sort of manual labor that was the only means Crowley had to keep himself going, and Crowley couldn’t help but wonder if the other man had noticed in turn how warm and rough and scratchy Crowley’s own skin must seem to him in comparison...

Crowley shook his head a little to stop that particular train of thought from going too far and kept moving, dabbing at the stain with napkin after napkin, yielding a comically large amount of blue-stained napkins but little actual reduction in the blue spot on Mister Fell’s suit.

“That... that didn’t actually help much, did it... I’m so sorry.”

Mister Fell shook his head. “Don’t be sorry. Accidents happen, and you did your best to make it better. It may not have entirely succeeded-” Mister Fell’s gaze dropped back to the stain on his suit, and his expression looked slightly pained. “-but it was a noble effort just the same.”

Crowley had to stop himself from laughing at the sheer oddity of the turns of phrase this man used without so much as blinking an eye. This convenience store was about as far as “noble” as Crowley could imagine, and he was pretty sure applying the adjective to anything he did on the job would be a gross misuse of the word--and, come to think of it, “effort” might be overstating things a bit, too.

(For a brief moment Crowley returned to a pattern of thinking that he had perfected over the years by reminding himself that really, all one needed to work here was to be a warm body present in the store at all times, that literally anybody could do what he was doing on the job here--but never mind all that, Mister Fell was talking again.)

“Thank you, Mister Crowley. Thank you very much for your assistance.”

That definitely hadn’t been what Crowley had been expecting to hear, and he could swear that his heart skipped a beat upon hearing it. Somehow, after years of retail customers calling him by the first name listed on his name tag, being addressed by surname actually felt _more_ intimate to Crowley than the alternative.

“You’re... welcome?”

He could barely string two words together, he sounded like an idiot, especially compared to Mister Fell-

Mister Fell, whose face had settled into a thin but clear smile now.

“I think I can handle working this machine by myself now. And really, don’t worry about the stain--I suppose one could say it even gives the suit character, in a way.”

Crowley nodded dumbly, though he didn’t entirely buy Mister Fell’s argument (and didn’t entirely believe that Mister Fell did either, for that matter) and returned to his register, eyes firmly locked on Mister Fell... who proceeded to fill his slushie as cleanly and smoothly as if he’d done it all his life, to the point where if he didn’t know better Crowley might have suspected that the request for his help in the matter had been some sort of elaborate practical joke.

After filling his slushie, Mister Fell took a single long sip of it, let out a contented sigh, and slowly but surely began to amble towards the shop’s door, slushie and crisps in hand. Before leaving, though, he turned back towards the register and towards Crowley, saying, “Goodbye, Mister Crowley, and may the rest of your day be a good one!”

Crowley wasn’t even sure what day it technically was at this point--the shop had a clock in it somewhere, but he never could remember where, so he wasn’t sure if it was past midnight yet or not--but that didn’t really matter, he supposed. The sentiment was a nice one just the same, and one that customers rarely bothered to extend towards retail workers without prompting, at least in Crowley’s experience.

(Also Mister Fell’s lips and tongue were already tinged a slight bluish-purple from trying a sip of the slushie but Crowley probably shouldn’t have found that as interesting to think about as he actually did-)

“Thank you,” Crowley said with a nod and a grin, “And the same to you, sir!”

Mister Fell left the shop, but Crowley’s mental image of him, of this dapper Victorian-looking man in a fancy beige suit and bow tie who apparently ran a local bookstore carrying a sizable bag of crisps and with his lips and mouth turned blue from the large slushie he was carrying, lingered on, and though Crowley had to deal with plenty of drunks and idiots and pranksters throughout the rest of that shift, that grin remained upon his face the entire time.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, consider following me on tumblr at [haberdashing](https://haberdashing.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
